Modern tourist guides have helped raised tourist expectations. And they have provided the natives--from Kaiser Wilhelm down to the... villagers of Chichacestenango--with a detailed and itemized list of what is expected of them and when. These are the up-to- date scripts for actors on the tourists' stage.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The French Revolution, Fichte's Theory of Knowledge, and Goethe's Wilhelm Meister are the three greatest tendencies of the age. Wh...oever takes offence at this combination, and whoever does not consider a revolution important unless it is blatant and palpable, has not yet risen to the lofty and broad vantage point of the history of mankind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Goethe's whole education and life were those of the artist. He lacks the unconsciousness of the poet. In his autobiography he desc...ribes accurately the life of the author of Wilhelm Meister. For as there is in that book, mingled with a rare and serene wisdom, a certain pettiness or exaggeration of trifles, wisdom applied to produce a constrained and partial and merely well-bred man,--a magnifying of the theatre till life itself is turned into a stage, for which it is our duty to study our parts well, and conduct with propriety and precision,--so in the autobiography, the fault of his education is, so to speak, its merely artistic completeness. Nature is hindered, though she prevails at last in making an unusually catholic impression on the boy. It is the life of a city boy ... defrauded of much which the savage boy enjoys.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a ...conquistador--an adventurer, if you want it translated--with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »